DAW & VSTs as keyboard-enhancement

DAWs and those precious VSTs have so much options to deal with sound and after an increasingly frustrating phase of "producing" songs in an effort to learn I saw my excitement and enjoyment suffer more and more and just recently I came back to what I really want to do with music:

I want to enjoy playing my electric piano (and guitar and e-drums) with different exciting new sounds like clean piano emulations or rhodes emulations. If everything is set up right, I enjoy every single tone (as long as I don't care too much about the final outcome)

So to all of you who are more interested in playing for your own enjoyment (ideally solo-stuff):
- what VSTs do you prefer to play?
- are there settings (Reverb for example) that are essential to your enjoyment of playing?
- does any of you enjoy playing synths like serum or ableton's operator? (I feel like it is something only used for producing, but maybe I just haven't found my way about it)

So far I really like the lounge-lizard and I think I prefer modelled pianos over sampled ones as I feel they respond faster and more natural, but maybe that's just my imagination...

For piano, it´s Pianoteq, if you´re pianist or you have someone who really knows it, it has lot of power, but also needs tweaking.
The best part is that is now available for Rasberry Pi also, with a little DIY you could easily stuck it inside any midi keyboard and have a nice gig piano also